Saturday, November 12, 2016

Liberals are making it almost impossible for Trump to fail

The Democrat party is in a precarious place. I don't think most people appreciate the full weight of just how deeply they have been exposed by Wikileaks, Guccifer, and Project Veritas. Among other things, we know they rigged their own primary, we know they colluded with the media to brainwash the masses, and we know they engaged in browshirt-style tactics and voter fraud. The only hint of credibility they have going for them is the precarious argument that at least they are not as evil as the party of Trump.

Beyond an ethics crisis -- and maybe crisis is a strong word when a large portion of the party members seem unconcerned -- is the party's loss of power (the thing they're really concerned with). All three branches of federal government will soon be held by Republicans, and the bulk of the states as well. All the while, the Democrats have a vacuum of leadership. Will they be able to regroup and run strongly in four years? Will the liberals in the party fall back in line with the Clinton surrogates, who cheated the liberal nominee and then went and lost in a landslide?

The only thing that can unite the party is a common enemy. And right now that enemy is clearly Donald Trump. If Trump succeeds, the Democrats may be out of luck for a long while; their only real hope is that Trump fails. But they are making it almost impossible for Trump to fail.

What does it mean for a president to fail? There are many things that can occur during a presidency that the president has little control over. The economy being the most notable. Presidents ride those waves, and those of global events, just like the rest of us. My thinking is a president fails when he doesn't deliver whatever it was he campaigned on. It wouldn't be fair to hold a politician to every last campaign promise, or even most given the way things seem to go. But there is always that core promise or ethos that defined their candidacy. George W. Bush ran on small-government principles, and utterly failed to do so. Obama's election was fueled on the hope and promise that basically he wasn't Bush. Given the expansion of the surveillance state, crackdown on dissent, and continuation of the Bush Doctrine, he has also failed, and it's not even close.

Trump himself has molded a platform of America First: ending trade deficits, stopping illegal immigration, restoring law & order, and so on. But that hasn't been the defining characteristic of his run. The most noteworthy depiction of Trump has been the left's reaction by him. By the hyperbolic hysteria that Trump is a racist, sexist, elitist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, anti-dentite, Russian-controlled hateful bigot. Basically, he's Hitler.

This is not exaggeration on my end. Check your facebook feed, or Twitter, or even the cable news channels. People are out there rioting because they are wholly convinced that America has basically just elected Hitler to the presidency. That makes a real low bar for presidential success. Trump doesn't have to be a great president. He doesn't even have to be a good president. He just has to not be a Nazi.

1 comment:

The hole in this may be that failure to delivers as promised doesn't kill re-election chances. Obama and Bush 43 were both re-elected. Bush 41 was not, but that was because of Ross Perot's 3rd party run. On the other hand, this hole in logic would only lead us to be even more sure of Trump's re-election, as even "failed" presidents (as I've described the term) get re-elected.